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Chicago COVID Travel Advisory Remains Unchanged, But Rates Of Infection Are On The Decline

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Chicago's top doctor shared good news regarding case rates in the city, but said the entire country is still listed on Chicago's Travel Advisory.

Doctor Allison Arwady, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) said territories are also in the list. But the rates of infection in city rates of infection are on the decline.

"The Omicron variant of course has had greater ability to evade immunity. We have seen more people get breakthrough infections if they have been vaccinated. We have also seen many, many more people who were not vaccinated and we're counting on a prior infection we've seen that have almost no protection with omachron and people get reinfected," Arwady said who added that even with infections, the COVID vaccine offers the best protection against serious complications.

"The most important thing is that people who get COVID, and have the vaccine, are much less likely to get seriously ill much less likely to end up in the hospital or to die or even to have an illness that extends beyond five days.

Arwady said in Chicago, there's an average of 1,037 new COVID cases a day.

"That is down about 50% from a week ago. We were averaging 2,000 cases a day just a week ago. And it's the fourth week in a row that we've seen a decrease of about 50% which is great."

The doctor added the majority of cases are of the Omicron variant.

"In Chicago, in Illinois, and across the US, it's almost all Omicron 99.8% of what we're seeing is the Omicron variant. And then the other point 2% are still Delta we're seeing almost nothing else to pick up," Arwady said, who added that the recently discovered Omicron subvariant was detected in Chicago and more cases could be found soon.

"We did detect it here in Chicago that is not surprising and it's a sign that our systems are working in terms of looking for any changes in the virus. It remains uncommon here. I do expect to see more increase among home upon samples. So there's an omachron version B 8.1, which is the original there's an older chrome version B 8.2, which is this one, there's even a normal conversion VA point three. If we start to see a major source of concern related to this, there's a good chance it could be in a completely different name, but at this point, we're counting it within Omicron. It is not clear that there are major differences in outcomes. We're following this closely."

The head of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Pedro Martinez said Tuesday is when students can return after five days of testing positive for COVID.

"If a child is positive, on the sixth day, they can come back to school, but they have to keep their mass at all time. And when they have to take them off for eating or drinking. They have to be whenever possible six feet social distance from others. So that's that's an important operational procedure that the schools have to put in place and so that's why we wanted to give the schools time to be able to implement that," Martinez said.

Arwady said while she remains positive that case rates will go down, she feels the city still has a little work to do before COVID restrictions are rescinded.

"The 15 per 100,000 per day, all along has been sort of the the cutoff for high risk. When you turn that into numbers here in Chicago, that's over 400 cases a day that and that's why we use that 400. That's when we're sort of high between," Arwady said. "The reason we show that chart all the time is that we're looking at cases, you know cases and positivity often, because we're testing so much more than we were early on. We watch that with it. And really those hospital capacity numbers honestly are the thing that I that we are watching kind of the most and we expect to watch in a long term kind of way. So we won't be changing metrics, you know, unless there's a change at the CDC level."

 

WATCH LIVE

WATCH LIVE: Dr. Arwady, Dr. Luna and CPS CEO Martinez will provide an update on COVID-19 cases, data, and update on how CPS is addressing new quarantine and isolation requirements. #ProtectChicago chi.gov/covidvax

Posted by Chicago Department of Public Health on Tuesday, February 1, 2022

 

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